Upgrade
by I.C. Weener
Summary: Did anyone see that Cyberpunk Venom movie?


" _Think of it as recycling."_

\- Jon Polito, Viper

" _She always did enjoy a tight squeeze."_

\- Pierce Brosnan, GoldenEye

" _She is one well-endowed lady. I'd like to get my hands on her ample nacelles, if you'll pardon the engineering parlance."_

\- Simon Pegg, Star Trek

* * *

A worthless remnant of technology from a forgotten era was crushed between hydraulic rollers and discarded into the scrapyard. Two figures clashed in a violent dance under the hills of crumpled and splintered scrap metal.

Luna fought with a natural rhythm that made her light on her feet. Sagria moved in an efficient and mechanical way that gave her more strength than mobility. She was the mirror reflection of her human opponent, only cast in gunmetal and roughly two feet taller.

Luna ran past Sagria and performed a rotating high kick. Sagria dodged and lashed out her energy whip. Luna vaulted backwards and fired a round from her blaster. Sagria strafed around the attack and knocked the blaster out of her grip, but Luna flung her wrist forward and deployed a pair of cables from the multi-function watch tucked under her glove. Sagria dodged before the wires could close around her and jetted toward Luna to deliver a rocket punch.

Luna ducked under an almost certain decapitation and threw an uppercut in return. Sagria clamped her hydraulic claws around Luna's forearm while her fist was still in the air. Luna punched with her remaining free arm, but Sagria blocked her with so much force that she spun completely around and ended up with her spine pressing against Sagria's front chassis.

Sagria wrenched her arm around Luna's neck and held her in a headlock. What she had in mind required a more horizontal positioning, so she simply shifted the gyros in her heels and fell backwards to the ground, bringing Luna on top of her at the same time.

Luna's graceful movements changed to something more like a wild animal trying to fight out of a trap. Sagria's arm remained pinned like a steel beam across her sternum, blocking her from sitting up or even rolling into a different position. Sagria's legs tangled around hers to reduce her frantic squirming. Sagria struggled to pull Luna's headset down her neck to expose the back of her head and prevent her human allies from listening in on things.

Sagria shifted her arms trying to wrestle the back of Luna's head in an adequate position, while Luna was less than cooperative. The goal was to make her brainstem seat directly between the rounded silicon insulation down the center Sagria's chest, which had just become an active electrical contact point.

Sagria pulled Luna backwards by her forehead and finally wedged her into just the right spot. Luna instantly ceased having a will of her own, becoming as limp as a doll bolted down to a metal cradle. Her bright green eyes continued to stare unblinking into the sky, while her lips were frozen slightly agape in a small gasp. She never made a sound. She never moved a muscle aside from when she breathed. Sagria's Binary Override Operational Buffer Supersystem was at full power, and the effect on Luna's brain was the same as holding a hard drive between two colossal electromagnets. Energy currents flowed out of Sagria's internal generator and swathed through Luna's head, erasing everything from her cerebellum to her frontal lobe with reckless abandon.

"Relax, little primate. I'll cleanse all of the pollution filling your mind," Sagria promised in a ghastly whisper. She might as well have been talking to a carrot, given Luna's motionless vegetative state.

Sagria sighed through her ventilators and closed her camera shutters. She activated her cloaking mode and seemingly dissolved into holographic pixels along with Luna, allowing the woman and the war drone to peacefully synchronize out of sight.

Aerial sentries patrolling the scrapyard from thousands of miles overhead eventually detected strange readings on the ground below. Their cameras picked up Sagria's icy energy readings situated underneath Luna's naked x-ray heat signature. A more magnified analysis showed a massive file transfer loading into Luna's head-region. Finding that the data stream was registered and currently passing all error checks, the sentries ended their investigation and simply continued on their routine patrol.

* * *

Casshan couldn't find a single sign of life anywhere in these discarded ruins. The mountains of crumpled metal endlessly stacked around him interfered with all of his sensors and left him lost in a winding maze. He and Luna had split ways trying to find an entrance into the Neoroid factory palace through its lightly guarded scrapyard, and he had warned her to not go too far on her own. He was a half-machine waging a war against a race of haywire environmental robots, but she was a mere human. He was always afraid she was going to do something reckless and end up stuck between a rock and a hard place.

He finally found her several miles into the scrapyard. She was on the ground huddled over on her knees and nursing the side of her head with one of her palms. Just behind her was the lifeless chassis of Sagria. The Neoroid had ceased all functions and her robotic body was already falling apart at the joints. Casshan was relieved Luna had made short work of her.

Luna was leaning with her head down and didn't seem to hear Casshan at first. The inside of her cranium was pounding with a deep and distant pain, the tell-tale sign of a successful transfer from hard electronic circuits to soft organic neurons.

As Casshan walked closer, Luna reacted with the deadly reflexes of a Venus flytrap. She instantly uncurled and wrapped her right hand around her left wrist. Two cables extended out of her utility watch, whipped through the air, and attached to the sides of Casshan's neck several yards away. She electrocuted him with all of the power stored in the watch's portable battery, paralyzing the human half of his body while shorting out the cybernetic half. She flexed her arm backwards and withdrew the wires from his neck as he crumpled to ground like one of the pieces of scrap iron surrounding him.

Luna climbed to her feet and lightly brushed the rest of her headache away. Her gloved hands traveled behind her back and adjusted the rear of her combat suit with a small tug. She glanced down at the upper curves of her breasts rising out of the the front of her suit. They weren't world-class brain-destroying electromagnets, but they had a nice springy bounce to them.

Casshan slowly lifted his head from the ground and struggled to focus his malfunctioning optics. As he looked up at Luna, he could see something had changed in her. There was a mechanical quality to her posture, and a slightly fiber optic sheen in her green eyes.

"Sagria?" Casshan gasped.

"Porting my processing signal into this neuralgynoschematicform wasn't as difficult as I calculated," Luna said with a dark smile. "Black King thought I was going out of order when I proposed this solution. He accused me of possessing pirated data once I showed him I was still storing a backup of this girl's anatomical scans from the first time she captured. He ordered all of the records to be destroyed so he wouldn't be reminded how he failed to execute her, but I convinced him to the benefits of my plan. With this body, I'll be able to infiltrate the human resistance and destroy 80% of it from the inside out within six months. I suppose I despise humans so I'll even become one myself just to be rid of them."

The thought made her chuckle softly through her lips.

"But I haven't left you out of my equations, Casshan. You'll hold a special place in my new organic memory banks. And your little dog, too."

Luna knelt to one knee and retrieved her gun from the ground. She silently walked toward where Casshan had fallen and inspected the weapon in her hand while she stood over him.

"Hmm. An Anti-Neoroid proton oscillator. I'll have to test how well it works."

Casshan barely had the strength to push himself an inch from the ground. His human spirit urged him to continue fighting even as his mechanical body failed.

"You haven't won!" he shouted in rebellion. "I'll still stop you for Luna's sake!"

Luna pressed her thumb to the weapon's charger, calmly aimed for the center of Casshan's head at point blank range, and fired.

* * *

 _Author's note: Talk about a booby trap._


End file.
